James Q. Wilson published the influential “broken windows” theory of crime. If police and the community ignore public disorder (symbolized by broken windows), then law-abiding people will be intimidated and criminals will get the message that “anything goes.”
Many police departments adopted this theory as part of “community policing.” Without good statistics on crime rates, nobody would know what worked in fighting crime.
Wilson writes a lot of good, long articles for my favorite, "City Journal." Here are some titles and URL's
"Why We Don’t Marry
James Q. Wilson
Everyone knows that the rising proportion of women who bear and raise children out of wedlock has greatly weakened the American family system. This phenomenon, once thought limited to African Americans, now affects whites as well, so much so that the rate at which white children are born to an unmarried mother is now as high as the rate for black children in the mid-1960s, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued his famous report on the Negro family. For whites the rate is one-fifth; for blacks it is over one-half."
city-journal.org
"The Reform Islam Needs
James Q. Wilson
We are engaged in a struggle to defeat terrorism. I have no advice on how to win that struggle, but I have some thoughts as to why it exists. It is not, I think, because Islam is at war with the West or because Palestinians are trying to displace Israelis. The struggle exists, I think, because the West has mastered the problem of reconciling religion and freedom, while several Middle Eastern nations have not. The story of that mastery and that failure occupies several centuries of human history, in which one dominant culture, the world of Islam, was displaced by a new culture, that of the West"
city-journal.org |
